Last week, I went to the Museum of Modern Art and saw Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project that is on display until October 10th. The exhibition features a series of videos that details the stories of a few individuals who have been forced by political and economic circumstances to travel illegally throughout the Mediterranean basin to find new homes. They are projected on separate screen throughout the museum’s selected space. In each single video, she the individuals narrate and show his or her own journey by tracing their steps with a permanent marker on a world map. Only the narrators’ voices and hands are visible while their faces remain unseen to perhaps protect their identity.

Museum critics have said that Khalili’s work takes on the challenge of developing critical and ethical approaches to questions of citizenship, community, and political agency. The argument is true and definitely notable in all of her interviewees’ videos. For instance, in “Mapping Journey #3,” an unidentified man talks about the amount of detours he talks to avoid state official checkpoints to visit his girlfriend. He states how it used be a simple hour trip that has turned into multiple hours due to government officials making it difficult to go through Palestine into Jerusalem. In “Mapping Journey #4,” a woman from Mogadishu discusses how she got caught along her journey to seek refugee in another country and ended up being deported to Italy. Although she has taken advantage and made use of her new home, she’s unhappy because she’s stuck in a country she doesn’t want to be in. In “Mapping Journey #2,” another man talks about how he was captured and unfortunately deported to Italy. All he seeks to do is to get papers and find work so he may provided for his mother. However, he is unable to accomplish his goals because the government makes it extremely difficult to give refugees papers.

Overall, I found the piece very intriguing. I have passed by the exhibition multiple times in other recent visits to the MoMA and was always drawn to it, but never stopped since I never heard any audio. It turns out one must wear headphones to hear the piece which makes sense or else everyone’s stories will topple over one another. It makes the exhibition intimate. I liked how it was a mixture of women and men’s stories. Khalili definitely brought attention to difficulties governments have caused refugees go through to get shelter.

Project 102 is Neïl Beloufa’s first solo New York museum exhibition that is being displayed at the Museum of Modern Art until June 12, 2016. He is an emerging a French Algerian artist who received his Visual Arts National Diploma at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2007), and studied at Cooper Union, New York, and CalArts, Valencia, California. It features an installation titled The Colonies (2016) which projects images on a moving exposed/ see through piece made from inexpensive construction materials and techniques. There are cameras installed on the piece and around the room that are capturing a live feed of the space. The live footage being captured is mashed up with the video People’s Passion, Lifestyle, Beautiful Wine, Gigantic Glass Towers, All Surrounded By Water (2011). The video includes a series of individuals talking about their experience within an unknown city with Spanish subtitles underneath. The people speaking are never seen; only the audio from their interview is featured. Instead, the current time is projected on the center of the monitor while a collage of live footage and images that correspond to their responses play. For instance, if one of the women speaking mention something she likes, an image of a thumbs up appears. If one of the men states something is unnatural, a thumbs down sign appears. Along with the audio from their interview, there is also music and natural sounds of birds chirping is playing.

Beloufa’s exhibition is a great example of experimental video and artwork. It has been said that “the aim of experimental filmmaking is usually to render the personal vision of an artist, or to promote interest in new technology rather than to entertain or to generate revenue, as is the case with commercial films” which is exactly what Beloufa does in his work. He makes material that may seem unappealing on their own intriguing with the help of video collage he created. He is truly able to grasp the attention and engage museum goers with his simple yet complex piece.

Laura Poitras held her first solo museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art titled Laura Poitras: Astro Noise which expands on her cinematic work into a series of installations and immersive media environments. The exhibition’s title came from an encrypted file Edward Snowden gave Piotras for her previous work, Citizenfour, that contains evidence of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency and references thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang which what the museum’s goers ultimately views and experiences throughout the space. Not only does the exhibition include footage from NSA’s mass surveillance, but it also presents content from the war on terror, the U.S. drone program, Guantánamo Bay Prison, occupation and torture which expands upon her other projects to document post September 11.

In order to portray Poitras’ vision, the exhibition has been divided into five spacious sections. The first section of the exhibition is visible as museum goers exit the elevators: they are greeted by pigmented inkjet prints of distorted signals collected by the United Kingdom’s surveillance agency mounted on the wall. Although it is not images from the United States’ agency, it demonstrates how the events of September 11 caused deep fear among international nations to monitor possible threats sent through signals from satellites, drones and raiders. Following the prints is the entrance to one the large sections of exhibition which contains a large monitor that projects a double sided video for the installation titled O’Say Can You See. The monitor juxtapose scenes of people gazing at the unseen remains of the World Trade Center following the attacks in slow motion without live sound with military interrogation footage of two Afghanistan prisoners allegedly affiliated with Al-Qaeda as the national anthem is playing in the background. The inclusion of these two scenes powerfully shows how Americans reacted towards the tragic events back then and now through the live reactions from goers within the space.

Bed Down Location is the second large section within the exhibition. It features a mixed media projection of the night skies over Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan where the drone wars occurred along with audio from the sound of drones flying, pilots speaking and radio noses from the edge of the universe. The installation allows goers to get a sense of what the people within these areas heard and what the people who were targeting them saw.  The last two sections of the exhibitions titled Disposition Matrix and November 20, 2004 display videos, primary documents, interviews and diagloue within light boxes and window like slits. Poitras has been quoted to say that this section of her exhibition is “to evoke a notion of the deep state, of a hidden world, of something hard to see.” The pieces featured truly resonate with goers and allows them to reflect upon how their governments may view and target certain people or places based on information they have gathered from surveillance.

Overall, Poitras raises several ethical dilemmas through her exhibition’s narrative. She brings attention to the intelligence information not only collected by the United States’ government, but also by other government agencies across the globe. She asks the goers to take into consideration what they just viewed, decide what their position is and hopefully take a stand against the ongoing war on terror.